How to play more than 1,000 pinball, video games at Banning’s Museum of Pinball

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A new Batman pinball game is seen Feb. 24 at the Museum of Pinball in Banning. The more than 1,100 pinball and arcade games will be available to play during the Arcade Expo on St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

A pinball game is seen Feb. 24 at the Museum of Pinball in Banning. The more than 1,100 pinball and arcade games will be available to play during the Arcade Expo on St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

“If there’s a duplicate, it’s because something is different, like a plastic playfield instead of wood,” said John Weeks, the owner of the museum.

His collection of more than 600 pinball and 300 arcade machines includes games dating back to 1855 (a game where a ball drops down a board with pins hammered into it, similar to Japanese pachinko), but most of the games were built between 1961 and 2015.

Weeks owned arcades in the 1980s before switching over to the mail-order business. He sold all the games he originally owned but started buying them again in the 1990s. His collection, housed in a warehouse across from the Banning Municipal Airport, was a private affair before he threw open the doors to the public, one weekend a year, in 2015.

That first year, the Arcade Expo attracted 3,500 gaming fans and hundreds more attended last year.

“I think it’s successful,” Weeks said. “We’re still losing money because we’re only open (to the public) once a year.”

The museum is a nonprofit group and mostly relies on word of mouth among pinball fans. And owning and maintaining all those machines, many of which include parts that haven’t been made in decades, isn’t cheap.

“But now we’re thinking about opening three times a year. So maybe we’ll break even,” Weeks said.

Before the doors open for this year’s Arcade Expo, the museum is getting some last minute-remodeling, including a new patio, to turn the facility from more than just one man’s outsized collection of games and into more of a destination for Southern California gamers.

Just like last year, there will be a pinball tournament, video game-inspired live music, and food and drinks served on location. But the big draw, as always, is the games.

“If you came for all three days, I still don’t think you could play every game in here,” Weeks said.

Beau Yarbrough wrote his first newspaper article taking on an authority figure (his middle school principal) when he was in 7th grade. He’s been a professional journalist since 1992, working in Virginia, Egypt and California. In that time, he’s covered community news, features, politics, local government, education, the comic book industry and more. He’s covered the war in Bosnia, interviewed presidential candidates, written theatrical reviews, attended a seance, ridden in a blimp and interviewed both Batman and Wonder Woman (Adam West and Lynda Carter). He also cooks a mean pot of chili.